CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA - An epic Australian outback movie starring Hugh Jackman of X-Men fame and Oscar-winning actress Nicole Kidman will spearhead a new tourism campaign designed to recapture the country's 'mojo' and lure more visitors Down Under.

Titled Australia and directed by flamboyant Australian director Baz Luhrmann, the A$130-million (S$169million) film follows an English aristocrat (Kidman) who inherits a sprawling property and falls in love with a rugged drover (Jackman).

The movie features sweeping Outback scenery and is set in northern Australia just before World War II.

The two actors take 2,000 cattle overland and get caught in the war-time bombing of Darwin by the Japanese.

Tourism Minister Martin Ferguson said: "This movie will potentially be seen by tens of millions of people and it will bring to life little-known aspects of Australia's extraordinary natural environment, history and indigenous culture."

Tourism Australia will kick off an international marketing campaign to coincide with the film's planned release in November, he said. The epic was tipped to bring the biggest boost to tourism since Crocodile Dundee in 1986.

Some cinema critics have predicted the film will be an amalgam of Australian cliches.

But tourism industry officials are hopeful the movie epic will kickstart the country's tourist arrivals, which have stagnated since the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

The film, Luhrmann's first since Moulin Rouge in 2001, has been shot on location in the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia, the Northern Territory capital Darwin and the tropical city of Bowen.

Australia's government recently dumped the controversial A$180-million "Where the bloody hell are you?" tourism campaign featuring a bikini model, which was banned in Britain and Canada.

Mr Ferguson has flagged a new international campaign presenting Australia for the next three years as a "mature, inviting country" while riding on the expected popularity of the country with international audiences.

A Tourism Australia official told the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper that Australia would be "basically a 21/2-hour ad" for the country.

Tourism numbers have fallen recently as the Australian dollar approached parity with the United States greenback and with rising fuel and airline ticket prices keeping many potential visitors away.

Tourism industry spokesman Christopher Brown lamented this month that Australians had "lost our mojo" for tourists.

Overseas arrivals were down 1.2 per cent in February and 0.7 per cent in January.

Holidaymakers injected A$85 billion into the A$1-trillion economy in 2006 to last year, with overseas visitors accounting for A$22 billion of that, according to the latest Australia Bureau of Statistics data. --Reuters